


Conduit

by 30xf



Series: 201 Days Of X Files [4]
Category: The X-Files
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-02
Updated: 2015-09-02
Packaged: 2018-04-18 17:20:58
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,104
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4714169
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/30xf/pseuds/30xf





	Conduit

Dana Scully was on room three in her thorough cleaning of her apartment. Quite an accomplishment considering the place only had 4 rooms in total. She'd left the kitchen for last, knowing it could wait if she didn't have time for it. She had begun in the bathroom, innocently enough by throwing out a toothbrush belonging to her now ex-boyfriend, Ethan. 

Her plan for the night had been to come home from work, shower, and then meet friends for dinner. But that plan was thrown off when she arrived home to find Ethan waiting outside her door. She appreciated the fact that he hadn't used the key she had given him and let himself in, but that was about where her appreciation of his visit had ended. He had come to plead his case for another chance. Something he had done twice over the phone already in the weeks since they'd broken up. The break up had ended up being a mutual decision, albeit initiated by her. He seemed to forget this fact as he stood in her living room, holding tight to her with his face buried in her neck. Once she finally managed to push him away, they started talking, which eventually led to arguing, and transitioned into a screaming match that ended with him too emotional to go on with it, and her, red-faced and angry, but unable to stop herself from crying. At that point, she had quickly toured her apartment, grabbing anything that belonged to him (and some things he had given her) and tossing them in his general direction. He caught most of it, but let the gifts to her drop to the floor where they'd remain until she picked them up later. The visit ended with him slamming her apartment key down on the coffee table, controlling tears the way only men clinging to old fashioned ideals of masculinity seemed to be able to do. She calmly removed his apartment key from her key ring and handed it to him. She wiped clumsily at the tears on her cheeks as he stormed out, slamming the door behind  
him.

Her tears hadn't even been so much from sadness, but more out of frustration, anger, and mostly from a long overdue release of emotion. After composing herself, she called her friends to opt out of their dinner plans, and then changed into her most comfortable pair of jeans, and one of her old Quantico t-shirts and started cleaning. After the toothbrush went, she decided she needed to remove every trace of him. Some hours later she was done the bathroom and the living room, and was a good way through her bedroom. It wasn't the room with the most reminders of him (that distinction belonged to the living room) but it was the one with the most intimate reminders. A pair of his underwear had gotten lost under her bed at some point. The blanket at the end of her bed still smelled of his cologne. The drawer beside her bed still held the last box of condoms he had purchased. And then there was her jewelry box. It contained a few items he had bought for her over the nearly two years they were together. But more important than that, it was where she kept the small, more important gifts from him. A dried flower from the first bouquet he'd given her; a Valentine he had given her earlier that year; a terrible picture he had sketched of her, signed with a heart and 'I love you'; a napkin from the restaurant outside of which they shared their first kiss. As she picked these things out she wondered if she had kept them so long because she was in love with him the whole time, of if they were to remind her that she had been in love with him once. She put them in a box with all the other things she had collected and shoved it into the back of her closet.

As she continued to tidy things up, she found her mind wandering less to Ethan, and more to Mulder. She was worried about him. Their last case had taken a toll. It had reminded him of his sister in a way that left his feelings regarding her fresh and painful. Scully knew she shouldn't have listened to the tapes of Mulder's hypnotic regression of her disappearance. Or at least, she shouldn't have done it right before going home for the weekend. The more she thought about it, she couldn't get his voice out of her head. On those tapes he had sounded so small...so lost. Through the years, that tone of voice seemed to have manifested itself into a look in his eyes when he talked about his sister. 

Scully stopped and stood in the middle of her room. With her hands on her hips, she sighed. She wondered when she'd ever worry about herself, rather than other people. It was a trait she'd gotten from her mother, and one she'd most likely never outgrow. She had transitioned directly from worrying about Ethan into worrying about Mulder, and she supposed the two never really could have co-existed in her life. Or at least not in her mind.

Momentarily abandoning her cleaning, she padded to the kitchen in her bare feet to retrieve a beer from the fridge. After her first long pull from the bottle, there was a knock on the door. Her first thought was that it must be Ethan, back for round two. But something in her told her it wasn't. She slowly opened the door to find Mulder there, looking slightly  
disheveled in the clothes he had been at work in all day. And he looked as if he might have been crying not long before. Unaware she looked much the same, Scully stepped aside without a word, and Mulder entered her apartment. He hadn't been there often, and only to pick her up for work, save for when he burst in the night Eugene Tooms attacked her. Without question as to why he was there, she offered him a beer and they sat and talked. Only about work, but in a way that seemed to soothe them both. Before long, they had ordered dinner, and were laughing and joking and both not quite remembering how their evenings had started. He left just after midnight, neither of them aware that they had just begun a long tradition of shared evenings, working through their problems together without ever even talking about them. A silent communication that had yet to be noticed.


End file.
